Question Simple Hard Drive swap stops windows 10 from booting

[TheMoondog1098]

I had a 140gb SSD in my PC set aside for my other PC until got anotger SSD. Same brand and everything I swapped the drives. Mind you the 140gb was formatted but it was completely empty. I have my windows 10 installed on my 1tb nvme drive. After the swap my computer booted right to bios and even after picking csm mode and picking the nvme drive it says please install bootable drive and reboot. What gives? I tried to install windows on that new SSD but aborted it after it was stuck on 0% for a few minutes and that seems to bricked it in the sense windows now refuses to install on it since it's not a GPT drive or something, I know the fix to that is to delete all partitions but it's crucial I don't lose my data on that nvme drive. The bios knows the drive and it's name but is like unaware it has windows on it I guess. I've tried using bootsec and diskpart to no avail. Made the nvme boot option #1 but still gives same message. I don't know how me replacing a empty 2.5 inch SSD would impact my nvme drive that's attached to my motherboard... If theres a way to strictly make the system boot off that drive or some kind of override in the cmd I'd be open to trying it. But so far it looks like I need to remove all of my hard drives including my nvme drive just to get windows onto my new SSD and I'm afraid if I remove the nvme drive it'll cause further issues. Diskpart shows the drive healthy and already a primary partition so it makes zero sense. And of course windows media tool says can't repair windows instantly.

Specs: B550M PRO
Ryzen 5 5600x
GTX 1070
1TB HDD
500GB SSD
WD BLACK 1TB m.2 drive (windows)
250GB SSD (Kingston)

 

[TheMoondog1098]

So I may have jumped the gun, but after 4 hours of trouble shooting and after 30 minutes of me making this thread I was finally able to restore my nvme drive's windows. I didn't see there was a option within my bios to secure erase a drive, so I erased the new drive I got, and windows was finally able to install itself on to that drive. After that I verified my data was still there on the nvme drive, looked up how to regain that volume of Windows, turns out all I had to do was run a simple cmd command to install boot files onto that drive. So the whole issue was there was no boot files on that drive to begin with thus preventing the computer booting to it. Might not be the absolute answer but after restarting I was prompted with two volumes and volume 2 was my old windows and it worked flawlessly. Wish I could've known this sooner and didn't rely on Windows and my bios in general to be so simple as to just detect windows and boot it, it was obviously a little more complicated than that.

Video that helped me:

View: https://youtu.be/J4vPfPSW_KA

 

[dwd999]

So I may have jumped the gun, but after 4 hours of trouble shooting and after 30 minutes of me making this thread I was finally able to restore my nvme drive's windows. I didn't see there was a option within my bios to secure erase a drive, so I erased the new drive I got, and windows was finally able to install itself on to that drive. After that I verified my data was still there on the nvme drive, looked up how to regain that volume of Windows, turns out all I had to do was run a simple cmd command to install boot files onto that drive. So the whole issue was there was no boot files on that drive to begin with thus preventing the computer booting to it. Might not be the absolute answer but after restarting I was prompted with two volumes and volume 2 was my old windows and it worked flawlessly. Wish I could've known this sooner and didn't rely on Windows and my bios in general to be so simple as to just detect windows and boot it, it was obviously a little more complicated than that.

Video that helped me:

View: https://youtu.be/J4vPfPSW_KA

For future reference, the Windows installer is kind of "quirky". It generally works best when only 1 drive is connected at installation time; other drives can be connected after installation is complete. Personally I prefer to prepare my drives for installation by using a disk partitioning tool like Gparted or Minitool Partition Wizard. I make sure that the drive has a GPT partition identifier and that all of the drive space is totally unallocated. I've found this works best and allows the install to proceed quickly without problems.